Music Listeners

music moots: Colin Kennedy

'It's been awhile' but we are back with a new edition of Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask people I know either from the internet or real life to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.

Today's recommender is Colin Kennedy! Colin is a rare internet turned IRL moot; when I was listening to Brat when it first dropped and feverishly desiring to go dance to it IRL somewhere in Los Angeles, Colin recommended a relevant Charli-and-friends-themed dance party and we ended up chatting a bit there! Colin, you should know, makes delicious dream pop music under his own name, his latest release having been mastered by Heather Jones of So Big Auditory, who I happen to have interviewed for this very blog!! Wow, it's all coming together.

ANYWAY after an initial conversation about how good the Ting Tings are, I though I'd ask Colin for a music rec, and he delivered: "SKY SKY 1.3 [2016 Export Wav]" by Flume. Here's Colin on the rec:

"Putting music people on to Flume always feels like a 'hear me out'. So hear me out.

I don’t think SKY SKY 1.3 (2016 Export Wav) was ever supposed to see the light of day, until the Australian producer (most known for having a string of quasi-hits during the 2016 future pop/edm crossover craze) decided to batch release a bunch of his more experimental demos in 2023, and I’m very glad he did.

This song’s production makes you feel like you’re always on the precipice of something coming into view, but it never does. Truly a yearning song. A killer vocal performance by pop song smith Sarah Aarons is brutal and powerful without feeling Christina Aguilera / Jessie J."

Oooh yeah, I feel the yearning. In our build-and-drop, bass-boosted world, there is something tantalizing about releasing a song that doesn't have a clear moment of catharsis. My Entertainment-oriented ears itch for the moment the drums are supposed to kick in and guide us to the club followed by a trail of women all hoisting champagne bottles with sparklers stuffed in them, but Flume does not want to do this for us, and we are probably better off for it. A song that gets off on withholding is a unique prospect.

What stands out to me on this track is the sensation caused by the almost violent motion of the swerving sub-bass, which rips its way over the jewel toned synths in a literally gut-wrenching way. On noise-cancelling headphones, I felt it in my stomach, roller coaster style!

I love how the vocals start muted and then break their way out of the mix. A pitfall of enjoying EDM is that some producers' taste in vocals is fairly corny. I've found I sometimes need to fight my way past some pretty gnarly, cheesy stuff in order to get to the good shit, especially in our current era of singing about mental health using terms directly from the DSM-5 and whatnot. But the Sarah Aarons vocals on this have clarity and restraint that is perfectly oriented to this wistful little number, which diffuses at the end like a spritz of low sillage perfume.

The last thing I will say about Flume is that I was out dancing one night and his remix of Disclosure "You & Me" played, just for a minute or so, and even though that song has been pretty overplayed since its release, the way it sounded on club speakers...oh boy...positively nutty. I got completely lost in the sauce. Flume definitely knows how to use negative space and anticipation to make you feel something—for him, it seems like "the drop" is not the addition of the beat, but the removal of it. Going down the stairs, thinking you have one more step, getting caught short, and having your butt fly through your throat.

Thank you Colin!

Check out Colin's music here and his cool website here.

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